Travan

Definition - What does Travan mean?

Travan is an 8-mm linear magnetic tape storage design and developed by 3M for the mass storage market, specifically for long-term data backup. It uses a magnetic tape, which is 8 mm wide and 750 feet long, and boasts easy adaptability, good performance and a relatively large storage potential. It competed directly with the DDS (Digital Data Storage), VXA and AIT (Advanced Intelligent Tape) tape formats.

Techopedia explains Travan

Travan magnetic tape storage uses a linear track technology that writes data onto individual tracks over several successive passes. Fully reading or writing a Travan tape requires moving the tape from reel to reel many times because of the need for successive read/write passes. But unlike competing technologies like Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and Linear Tape Open (LTO), Travan does not automatically verify the data after being written; instead, it requires a separate verification process done by the operator. If data verification is not performed after each backup, it is possible that the backups may have been corrupt and unusable from the very beginning and the problem was not detected.